I actually wrote about something similar last fall, so I just uploaded it to my homepage. It was actually an assignment for a business class, and the professor's comments are pretty funny:
Thanks for taking the time to share your experience. I appreciate you starting with context and the sections about innovation and data had me laughing.
Great essay and reflection, full of some funny nuggets:
"My strategy of pre-emptively antagonizing anyone who might possibly have an interest in acquiring or funding the site has worked wonderfully."
"I enjoy the looking-glass aspect of our industry, where running a mildly profitable small business makes me a crazy maverick not afraid to break all the rules."
Glad you enjoyed it! We're eager to write more transparent content like this, so let us know if there's anything specific that'd be interesting (eg. recruiting, finance, etc).
I hope that at least some people see this as a genuine post -- it was inspired from a true event that happened just a week and a half ago. I don't have facts to back up a lot of what I say, but basic experience in getting business feedback will make it quite clear what I mean.
Thanks - I'll keep that in mind (and I agree - real life situations with examples are much more interesting than regurgitated textbook material! [not suggesting that's what A VC's MBA Monday's blog is whatsoever]).
This is a fascinating article. It will be a Harvard Business School case study. Even though it's not about online businesses, everyone should read it top to bottom.
Hey thanks for reading, I'm the author of the piece. The original went through a couple rounds of edits since it's on the company page but PM if you want the original :)
Author here. Thanks for the stylistic comments, folks. I purposefully did this in about 30 minutes in stream-of-consciousness format. It should be off-putting and odd. It's not like most of the polished (and admittedly marketing) material you see elsewhere on HN. I hope I didn't waste anybody's time.
My own research flow is to read and consume a lot on the material I'm trying to absorb, then try to put that into some kind of essay, either to others or to myself, once I think I have something useful that's resulted. Then, if I'm working on a larger work, months later I come back and collect the associated works and use them as a basis for a first draft of long-form material.
I had no idea it would get many votes. Frankly, I wanted to share this with another site but whenever I share there, it gets auto-posted here. So I figured I would go ahead and submit here myself if it was going to show up in the feed anyway.
If anybody is interested in carrying on the discussion please ping me! I'm finding it fascinating to develop a meta-model that covers both machine, human, and organizational learning. Not sure that anybody's done that before. So far it's been a hoot.
Wow, I really enjoyed that. For a totally unexpected reason...
There's lots of discussion here at hn about MBAs and I often comment about how little use I got out of mine. I remember little from marketing, finance, and operations classes. But I remember the case studies. The comprised almost half of the curriculum. And I hadn't thought much about them for years. Until reading this post.
This reads like a Harvard Business Review case study. It's got everything that makes for good business reading: compelling ideas, profit and loss, tradeoffs between profit and growth, economic considerations, competing interests, and most of all, characters. For a minute there, I thought I was reading Lee Iacocca. This could even make a great Hollywood script.
Great post. Thank you dwynings. I gotta get this book!
I work as a business/technical analyst. I find some of the suggestions in documents like this applicable to other types of analysis, so I just wanted to share.
Considering it was one of my most upvoted submissions, I believe people appreciated it.
That was really amazing and I learned a lot. A thought on presentation - I've got a longer attention span and more endurance than the average blog reader, I am rather completely fascinated by this topic and it's directly relevant to me, and yet I had a hard time getting through that entire post in one sitting.
It required an awful lot of thinking on one unified theme (how law shapes the business landscape), but all the examples were stand alone and thought provoking in and of themselves. I wonder if a three part series might not get more readers reading all the points, more exposure, and more knowledge spread. But that's a presentation point only, cheers for the very fascinating, incredibly well researched and presented piece. The regulation tying profits to return on capital and inability to store surplus power strikes me as particularly crazy.
http://alexkrupp.com/midterm.html
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